Thursday, April 09, 2009

Short Takes


A particularly engaging review of Jakle and Sculle’s MOTORING appears in this month’s Rain Taxi online: “To dig into the bedrock of history and assumptions our roads are built on, spend some time with John Jakle and Keith Sculle’s MOTORING: THE HIGHWAY EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA. The promise of the road and its reality are very different, as Jakle and Sculle demonstrate in this well-researched book.”

“Frogs: The Thin Green Line,” a PBS documentary that aired this week features John Jensen (AMPHIBIANS AND REPTILES OF GEORGIA) on the rapid disappearance of gopher frogs from the highly compromised longleaf pine ecosystem in the coastal plain of Georgia and five other states. Watch the full episode online.

Matthew H. Bernstein’s SCREENING A LYNCHING gets a plug on Curled Up With a Good Book. Interviews with Bernstein will air on a number of radio programs in Atlanta, including WABE “Between the Lines” with Valerie Jackson, Radio Sandy Springs, AM 1690 “The Voice of the Arts” with David Lewis, and the Fulton County Library Channel; a new PBS documentary on the Leo Frank case premieres in Marietta April 30.

A collection of poems by Mitchell Douglas devoted to Donny Hathaway is just out from Red Hen Press; see it thoughtfully compared with Ed Pavlic’s WINNERS HAVE YET TO BE ANNOUNCED at Post No Ills.

ON TARZAN was included – alongside other university press books on Batman and Tony Soprano -- in a popular culture column in the Toronto Globe and Mail: “Vernon excels at historical context, weaving Tarzan's countless reincarnations into everything from the Nazis to Vietnam.”